Vibe Ops, Spec Kits, and the AI Agent HR Problem Nobody’s Solved Yet
The Real Talk: A Closer Look: Vibe Coding Grows Up John Capobianco, head of AI and DevRel at Itential, described his shift from vibe coding (letting AI write whatever, with little structure) to spec-driven development: a structured, Git-tracked process of writing a constitution, a spec, a plan, and tasks before any code gets generated. For […]
Cyber News: Bug Bounty Fail, Open-Source Malware & Facebook SMB Phishing
Eric Brown, CISSP, Nick Mellem and Joshua Schmidt run through the week’s biggest cybersecurity headlines — from underground hacking tutorials to a Microsoft bug bounty fumble to a new hire getting phished on day three. 🔗 Ep 90 – Live Cyber News: Hackers’ Playbook, Microsoft Zero-Days, and the Text That Found a New Hire on […]
From First Responder to First Line of Defense: AI, Public Safety, and the Authenticity War
The Real Talk: A Closer Look: The Social Media Playbook, Repeating Itself Braden Frame spent years helping law enforcement catch up to social media — a battle that cost departments credibility and community trust before they found their footing. Now he’s watching the same story unfold with AI. The departments that stayed silent during the […]
Quantum Ransomware, AI Agents Gone Rogue, and the Gmail Trick Hackers Are Already Us
The Real Talk: A Closer Look: When Ransomware Goes Quantum (Kind Of) A relatively new ransomware family called Kyber is doing something novel: it touts quantum-safe encryption to its victims. Not as a technical flex for its own developers — as a psychological weapon against the people it’s shaking down. Guest Bill Harris broke down […]
When the Classroom Gets Hacked: The ShinyHunters Canvas Breach
Finals week is already one of the most stressful times of the academic year. For millions of students in May 2026, it got significantly harder when a threat actor group called ShinyHunters compromised Instructure, the parent company behind Canvas. With 30 million active users and 8,000+ institutional customers, Canvas serves as a central hub for […]
Your Inbox Is Already Compromised (You Just Don’t Know It Yet)
The Real Talk: A Closer Look: The Microsoft Security Trap Cameron Birkland, IT Audit Labs team member and CTF three-peat champion, laid it out plainly: Microsoft isn’t incentivized to make great email security. Their model is to get you on the platform and upsell you on protection. What you get out of the box with […]
OSINT Isn’t Trivia. It’s Your Account Recovery Map.
Too many teams still treat OSINT as a scavenger hunt. Attackers do not. They correlate phone numbers, legacy emails, birthdays, family names, breach artifacts, and marketplace handles into a single story: how to recover, reset, or reissue access around your controls. Here is the uncomfortable truth for security leaders: enterprise exposure is often shaped by […]
Ghost in the Machine: The AI Agents Nobody’s Watching
The Real Talk: A Closer Look: Ghost Identities Are the Real Attack Surface Madhav Nakar, security researcher on the Phantom Labs team at Beyond Trust, came back from RSA with a clear-eyed read on where organizations are most exposed. When companies moved from on-prem to cloud, they got an influx of new identities to manage. […]
Nation-States, Supply Chains, and the Router in Your Closet
The Real Talk: A Closer Look: From Espionage to Disruption Iranian-linked threat group Charming Kitten claimed responsibility for a cyberattack on medical tech company Stryker, disrupting a Microsoft Intune environment in what appears to be a deliberate escalation from the surveillance and defacement operations that characterized the early days of the conflict. Eric Brown, CISSP […]
Cognitive Surrender: How AI Is Hacking Your Brain Before It Hacks Your Network
The Real Talk: A Closer Look: Cognitive Surrender Is the New Attack Surface James McDowell, PhD, forensic psychologist, cybercrime researcher, and adjunct professor at American Military University, opens with a term worth writing down: cognitive surrender. As AI tools absorb more of our daily thinking, we’re not just becoming less sharp—we’re becoming more exploitable. Attackers […]